Inclusivity and diversity in CFP at the upcoming Symfony conferences

Today is the last day to submit a talk proposal for SymfonyLive London and SymfonyCon Lisbon. Again we would like to thank all the people who already submitted a talk proposal, we received a lot of very good talk proposals, thank you. As we want to be as much inclusive as possible we're calling everyone within the Symfony community to contribute in our CFP.

So if you're still hesitating or you forgot to send in your talk proposals, here is a recap of all you should know about our CFP and more!

Mentoring speaker program:

CFP are open to anyone in the Symfony community who wants to share an experience about Symfony, tips, a use case or anything that could help other community members to use Symfony. Unexperienced speakers are welcome, we've created a mentoring program for speakers to help anyone to take the plundge and submit a talk proposal.

But mentoring program for speakers is also for anyone in the community willing to contribute to the CFP but not ready to speak yet. How can you do that? Well, you just have to let us know what topics you'd like to be hearing at the conference or who you'd love to listen to! I mean that you maybe have some questions about a specific topic and you would like to get all the answers you need; or you know someone in the community who helped you when you got stucked with a specific issue and you think this person should share his/her experience with the entire community: then you just have to let us know about it in the comments!

Speaker package:

Each selected speaker of any Symfony conference receives a speaker package including a free ticket to attend the conference, travel and accomodation reimbursement (depending on the conference and the speaker's country of departure), an invitation to the speaker dinner, a speaker gift and a 30% discount on the Symfony certification exam! It's a full package to make your speaker experience an incredible experience!

CFP process and diversity:

The CFP criteria are available online and are the same for all the conferences: we're looking for the best Symfony-focused topics that are relevant to the community. We don't select speakers based on any racial, gender or physical criteria: all the talk proposals received are studied no matter who the speaker is. In fact, the only things that are important are the topic itself and that you speak a comprehensible English! Once the Call for Papers is closed we take the time to study each talk proposal received. This selection process can take some time as we have to contact the speakers either to get more detailed information or get their confirmation if they are selected.

CFP general tips:

We definitely encourage you to submit several talks, so that we have more choices when building the program, and so that if a similar one is posted (happens quite a lot on trendy topics), you have more chances to be selected. Also, if you think that speaking on stage is not for you yet, you can anyway contribute to our CFP! As mentioned above, tell us in the comments of this blog post what topics/experienced speakers/community members you want to see on the schedule. This will help us during the speaker selection to create the conferences’ schedules. By the way, the CFP for SymfonyLive USA ends on July 8th, so if you don't have an idea for SymfonyLive London or SymfonyCon Lisbon conferences, you can submit a talk at the US conference!

Lastly, we remind you that the selection is purely based on the topic submitted to see if it fits to our Call for Papers criteria. We live by our code of conduct. All Symfony events are dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, age, sexual orientation, gender-reassignment, disability, physical appearance, race, religion or belief. We are dedicated to providing safety for everyone: speakers, participants and organizers included.

So, are you ready to become a speaker? We are waiting for your talk ideas, all of them! Submit now a talk proposal for SymfonyLive London, SymfonyCon Lisbon (last day today) and SymfonyLive USA (until July 8th).

See you at a Symfony conference soon!